When I Was Cool (34 page)

I never let Allen know I had stopped writing poetry. I knew no one was reading it, not my poetry at any rate. Only the magazines that the Kerouac School put out, like
Bombay Gin,
Trungpa's name for the school's literary magazine, or
Rocky Ledge,
put out by Anne Waldman and her husband, Reed Bye, were publishing me with any regularity. A small press called Hanging Loose in Brooklyn had put out a book of mine. It was called
Driving at Night.
It included poems I had written as far back as junior high school. I remember how excited I was when the editors told me that they had just gotten an
order for six thousand copies, an extraordinary number for a book of poems by an unknown poet. But then they had to give all the money back when it turned out that the orders had come from a driving school in Iowa. They thought the book was a manual on how to drive after dark.

I couldn't buy a break as a poet, so I started writing prose. I wrote a biography and a novel and some journalism. I felt about my jumping ship from poetry to prose the way Oscar Levant felt about Milton Berle when he announced his conversion from Judaism to Christian Science. “Our loss is their loss,” Levant had said. My poetry didn't set the world on fire, but that's all right with me. The world's on fire enough as it is.

 

It was close to three
A.M
. when we returned home. We tried to get back into the house, but for some reason Nancy's keys didn't work in the lock. A student of Nancy's—a kid from an old Virginia family who spoke French and loved the Beats—tried putting his shoulder to the wheel and forcing the door open. Nothing happened. I couldn't believe we were locked out of our own house, with a tired Allen Ginsberg, exhausted, in the middle of the night in Colonial Williamsburg. I had dreams like this that ended better.

A police car saw the four of us trying to break down the door of our house and stopped to investigate. He couldn't get the door opened, either, so he used his police radio to call a locksmith. We found one in Toano, about twenty miles away, who would take the job, but it was going to take a half hour at least before he could get to us—he'd been getting ready for bed when we'd called him. We had no choice but to wait.

Finally, the locksmith arrived. He was a stout, middle-aged man, a retired Vietnam War veteran, who brought with him a metal device for forcing the doorjamb. The locksmith apologized for taking so long. He said he usually goes to sleep early because there wasn't much call for a locksmith after the sun goes down. Allen admired the locksmith's strength when he finally forced the
door open with a loud pop. I thought of the epigraph Allen had placed in
Howl and Other Poems
: “Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” It was from Whitman.

The rug had apparently become caught up under the door; Nancy said she must have accidentally kicked it in her haste to get out of the house after searching for Allen's harmonium.

The locksmith said that he owed his strength to tai chi. Allen asked him to show him some moves, so out on the front lawn, close to four
A.M
., Allen Ginsberg and the heavyset locksmith practiced tai chi, while the policeman shone the beams of his headlights on the front lawn.

When we were finally back in the house, Allen wanted to stay up for a while and talk. He wanted to discuss the reading. He was full of insecurity about it: did he read too fast, did he read the right poems? His concerns were endless. He couldn't get settled with the idea that he had done a great job. He had given a wonderful performance.

Allen left the next day. A car picked him up; I still couldn't drive, so I could not take him to the airport myself. Upstairs in the guest room, he'd left a copy of his
Collected Poems.
He wrote in it, “This is from my heart to yours, still young old friend. Love, Allen.”

I looked for the Neal Cassady blow job poem. It wasn't there. Not that particular one, anyway. (Allen loved writing about giving head.) I searched for my birthday lament. That wasn't in there, either. Immortality denied!

I never saw him again.

 

Allen sold his papers, all those files, even the one he kept on Gregory's cat, titled “CAT—CORSO, GREGORY. ANIMALS POET PLAYED WITH,” to the University of California at Stanford for some real bread. He was able to buy a loft with an elevator in New York City—all those stairs on East Twelfth Street had finally become
too much for him. He moved his father's second wife, whom he revered, into the same building. He was finally able to afford health insurance. He needed it. Liver trouble was one of the things on Allen's list of ailments. Whenever he got hysterical and overwhelmed he would say, “I have Bell's palsy, high blood pressure, spastic bowel, and liver trouble. I can't deal with this now.” So you'd back off, take your problem elsewhere. But “liver trouble” was really hepatitis C, which became liver cancer, which meant the end for a worn-out body, even one as stout and indefatigable as Allen's. Wasn't it Allen's father who blurted out that weird couplet in the middle of dinner with Rinpoche at the Flagstaff House in Boulder so many years ago: “Is life worth living? It depends on the liver.”

Trungpa was the first to go. He died in Nova Scotia in 1987. He was forty-seven years old, pretty young for an old soul. His doctors wouldn't say what exactly was wrong with him, except that his liver was shot. Too much sake. His students said that he just wasn't attached to his body in the way nonenlightened people are. Some of Trungpa's students said that he knew he was wearing out his body, but that he didn't care. It was, they said, the ultimate act of crazy wisdom.

I was jealous. It's not that I wanted to die, I just didn't want to be afraid of death. Allen wrote songs to death; he wasn't afraid. Not when it counted, anyway, at the end. I think life is just too damn short. I want to be late for my death. I want the people I love to live forever, and the people I hate never to be born. It's too late for both: the hours and years mow us all down.

I started meditating after I heard about Trungpa's death. I'd heard that several monks had come just to prepare Rinpoche's body for cremation. They handed out small glass vials of the salt they used to preserve his body until the ceremony. His followers said that if you developed a serious illness, you could always break open the bottle and swallow the contents. It was supposed to have curative powers. Allen and many of Rinpoche's students meditated with the body around the clock. I thought about going, but I wasn't feeling so great myself.

I finally told my parents I was meditating after all those years of having successfully avoided it at the Kerouac School. “You can't beat the Judeo-Christian ethic,” my father reminded me, “especially the Judeo part.” He and my mother certainly didn't try to talk me out of it. Their paths were different. I think, though, that as a result of meditating, I've quit judging people so harshly. Now I believe in every religion. I'm not taking any chances: I meditate, therefore I am not.

 

Burroughs died in August 1997. He never got the Nobel prize that Allen had tried to nominate him for. He died in Lawrence, Kansas, buried among the other bad hombres of the American frontier. His secretary and assistant, his guardian angel, James Grauerholz, kept him alive longer than any doctor. James was like Ron Howard to John Wayne's dying gunslinger in
The Shootist.
He came into Bill's life after Jubal. Bill was lucky—luckier than his son, whom he outlived by many years. Billy Jr. got placed on a list for a liver transplant, had one, and to celebrate its success, went on a two-week bender. He didn't want his father coming to the hospital or riding home with him in the car. He made a lot of sad jokes and disappeared with his new liver and a few of the Westies into the dark old bars of Denver. Billy died of a heart attack right after that.

It's funny the things you think about when you first hear about the death of someone you cared about. Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997, at 2:40
A.M
. His obituary in the
New York Times
ran beside the reminder: “Daylight savings time resumed at 2
A.M
. today,” the kind of detail Allen would have put into one of his poems. When I first heard of his death, I thought, Now he'll never get the chance to go on MTV's
Unplugged,
which he really wanted to do, with Dylan and Beck as his special guests. He also wanted to have sex with Johnny Depp. Allen had plans.

I wondered who would have the job of packing away all his files. Allen was the most anal-retentive, revolutionary, bohemian poet you could meet. Burroughs said that the only man who loved files
more was J. Edgar Hoover, Allen's bête noire and the man whose agency, he thought, had planted a spy at the Kerouac School.

No one ever did uncover a spy at Naropa, though for one brief moment Allen actually thought it might have been Trungpa Rinpoche himself. The Kerouac School finally got its accreditation. It's a permanent part of Naropa University now, the first accredited Buddhist college in America. I went to see it recently. It had become something fine and good—a place of sanity and noble thought. I even saw Anne Waldman there, still teaching, still famously beautiful, still unable to be still. She's going to hate this book, but then, come to think of it, she never liked my poetry, either.

Gregory Corso wrote in his poem “Ode to the West Wind” how he had no home, no income, no status as a poet in America. Well, that's not entirely true. A wealthy benefactor did come along at the end of his life. So at least he didn't have to worry about where his next meal was coming from. But other than this generous handout, there wasn't much in the Corso bank account. He died in his daughter's home in Minnesota. Robert Frost, the only establishment “old poetman” that Gregory, alone among the other Beats, really liked, said that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” That's where Gregory went, and he was taken in. A recording of Gregory's poems was made at the end of his life, read by him and by Marianne Faithfull, who had started coming to the Kerouac School in the early nineties.

When Gregory, who “lived by the grace of Jews and women,” had stood at Allen's bedside as he died, he was himself dying of prostate cancer. When he passed away in January 2001, I read about it in the
New York Times
on the same day I agreed to write this book. I opened the paper and there it was.
The Happy Birthday of Death.

Gregory used to refer to himself as a toothless old man when I first met him, but he was only forty-six then. He'd lived long enough to see some of his contemporaries win major accolades, like the poet John Ashbery (whose poems Allen didn't under-
stand), who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and many international prizes for his life's work. Gregory, whose poems you can find in the
Norton Anthology of Literature,
still didn't have very much after all those years of poesy. “But I have walked in mine integrity,” Gregory used to say. It was the only time I heard him quote the Bible.

I heard that someone in Gregory's family planned to take his ashes to Italy and scatter them in the English cemetery in Rome, where Keats is buried and where Gregory had found his cat, Horace, which he'd brought to America and left on my doorstep, along with his manuscript of poems.

When Gregory's book
Herald the Autochthonic Spirit
finally came out—Allen had sent it to me—I eagerly opened it and looked for my name. Gregory hadn't thanked me, not anywhere, for all those months of baby-sitting him. All I could do was laugh.

Allen, by the time he had come to Virginia, was already a great man; at least, he was accepted, and he wasn't being kept out of the academies, or the anthologies, any more. He had his pin from the Academy of Arts and Sciences. And, like W. B. Yeats in Auden's memorial poem, Allen had survived it all. For Yeats it was Ireland, for Allen it was his mother's madness that had hurt him into poetry.

As for me, I had eaten the luminous cake of Allen's poetry. It was still there, glowing inside me.

I wonder if he can still see it after all this time.